Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
200 OAK ST SE
MINNEAPOLIS,MN 55455-2009
Performing Department
Institute on the Environment
Non Technical Summary
Summary: To maximize the sustainability of an agricultural landscape with solar, we seek a process that 1) identifies areas of high solar potential and minimizes opportunity cost of potential crop yields and livestock production and 2) maximizes the potential environmental benefits. To achieve this, we must first answer two prerequisite questions:Where should solar be placed?What should be planted with solar?The potential costs and benefits to energy production, crop management, species conservation and ecosystem service production depend on knowing the answers to these questions.With the answer to these questions, we will develop a full cost-benefit accounting framework will examine the technical feasibility of co-location of solar and agriculture, the economic viability of investment and opportunity costs, the ecosystem service co-benefits, the life cycle environmental impact implications of investment decisions on key agricultural production systems, and the implications for food and energy production (Figure 2). We will parameterize contributions to each of these economic and ecosystem service categories arising from a menu of conventional agricultural systems and habitat enhancements that would be planted with solar: grazing lands, bioenergy production, commodity crops, and wildlife-friendly plantings supporting birds and pollinators (Objective 1). Results will then be aggregated across economic and environmental benefits and costs pertaining to farmers, ranchers, rural communities and society at large (Objective 2). We will then use a multi-objective optimization model to identify spatial combinations of solar + planting options that maximize private and social returns from the landscape in terms of energy, economic value and biodiversity conservation (Objective 3). This optimization analysis will consider policy scenarios that internalize costs and benefits that are external to the land use decision.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
25%
Applied
50%
Developmental
25%
Goals / Objectives
The prospect of integrating farming, conservation, and clean energy decisions could simultaneously reward farmers for producing food and energy, and protecting natural resources. The goal of our proposal is to enable farmers, energy developers, governments, and communities to quantify the environmental benefits of deploying solar technologies in agricultural systems and identify opportunities to align the costs and benefits solar could provide to each stakeholder group. We aim to achieve this by quantifying the full economic and environmental costs and benefits of strategically integrated solar with agriculture. Our project will gather knowledge of solar's technical potential and the ecosystem services provided by different types of "solar plantings" by modeling the results of various deployments of solar placed (a) on existing marginal cropland, grazing land or CRP areas; with (b) either fixed, single or dual axis solar arrays; while varying (c) the type of planting and farm management practices associated with the each solar siting designed to support grasslands for birds, pollinators, livestock, or biofuels. We will integrate these cost and benefit streams into optimization routines that seek to provide diversified income to farmers, increase clean energy supply to local and regional communities, and improve the supply of natural benefits to society leveraging knowledge of supply chain dependencies influencing trade-offs between food, fuel and electricity. We will leverage our ongoing work in energy policy, ecosystem services, agriculture life cycle assessment, agricultural economics and life cycle assessment to provide a comprehensive and broad-scale assessment of solar's multi-benefit, multi-sector potential. We propose to adopt a regional focus on the Upper Midwest because it is a critical supplier of food to the country and is experiencing high levels of renewable energy growth. In particular our main objectives are to:Determine site-specific environmental and economic costs and benefits of co-located solar and agricultural land usesQuantify how those costs and benefits are distributed to landowners, developers, local governments and society. Identify opportunities for aligning costs and benefits to different stakeholder groups to enable solar deployment that creates greater co-benefits in the Upper Midwest. ?
Project Methods
Objective 1 - Determine site-specific environmental and economic costs and benefits of co-located solar and agricultural land uses.Task 1.1. Quantify ecosystems services and other environmental impacts of current and alternative solar-agriculture systems. We will use the InVEST suite of ecosystem service models31 and lifecycle analyses to estimate spatially-explicit impacts of each of the solar-agriculture options. The InVEST tools are land-use driven models that estimate the magnitude of biophysical processes relevant to ecosystem services between alternative scenarios. In this analysis, we will apply models for carbon storage, sediment and nutrient retention, and pollinator habitat to estimate the context-dependent potential impacts of given solar + planting development choices. The InVEST models are appropriate for this analysis because they are based on fine-scale data, matching the resolution of the land-use map used, but can be run at scales from single-watershed8,5 to global1. We will parameterize these InVEST models using existing literature and empirical data examining the effects of different solar + planting scenarios, e.g. Table 1.?Lifecycle environmental impacts of solar-agriculture systems: We will examine the spatial life cycle environmental impact implications of each solar-agriculture scenario considering differences in the solar technology and the agricultural practices employed.With regard to environmental impacts of different agricultural systems, management practices and planting mixes, we will first estimate the spatial impacts of existing cropland uses using county-specific life cycle impact factors for major crop commodities accounting for over 75% of the total US production, including corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa. These county-scale impact factors consider differences in the inputs of crop production (e.g. types and quantity of fertilizer use, irrigation and related energy use, differences in N2O rates and yields17). Similarly, we will use county-scale impact factors for existing livestock production (e.g. enteric fermentation and manure), representing conventional production practices (leveraging existing data products from the team). To capture the life cycle implications of alternative practices, we will use DAYCENT and COMET-FARM tools to estimate potential yield changes as a result of changing management practices (e.g. conventional to no-till operations or continuous grazing to adaptive paddock systems). Impacts of different seed mix plantings/harvesting practices will also be estimated using a combination of literature and empirical data from previous solar-plantings research.Environmental costs and benefits from ecosystem services, life-cycle, and supply chain models will remain in physical units unless markets or policies exist that pay landowners or developers in particular areas, such as carbon sequestration payments (NORI) or other ecosystem services (Ecosystem Service Market Consortium).Task 1.2. Quantify and combine site specific economic costs and benefits of solar and land use scenarios. We will estimate the installation cost of solar using data from NREL solar industry quarterly updates 39.We will estimate the total economic costs of foregoing a portion of existing production, using total foregone productivity (e.g. bushels or head) and combine with annual average commodity prices 42, as well as foregone revenues from crop insurance payments from historical crop indemnity data.Task 1.3. Quantify downstream impacts to food and energy production of solar-agriculture scenarios. Because of the contentious nature of placing solar on agricultural lands, we will estimate the potential trade-offs on US food and energy self-sufficiency from transforming existing marginal cropland uses to alternative solar-agricultural uses. To do so, we will quantify the total public benefits accrued to society as food production versus electric and fuel energy under each solar-agriculture scenario.We will combine these estimates with the total solar electricity energy generated in each of the scenarios, as well as estimates on the biofuel energy generation potential from converting marginal croplands to grasslands for 2nd generation biofuel production (determined through literature-derived conversion efficiencies and productivity potential). Similarly, we will estimate food energy generation potential of converting marginal lands to livestock grazing grassland systems for the different livestock scenarios, using livestock generation potential and loss-adjusted conversion efficiencies for estimating corresponding caloric consumption potential.Objective 2 - Quantify how those costs and benefits are distributed to landowners, developers, local governments and society. Task 2.1 - Distinguish costs and benefits for landowners and developers. We will expand upon a parcel-level dataset of landowners for the state of Minnesota to include the remaining states in the Upper Midwest (www.placeslab.org/data). We will use this information on current land and property rights to allocate costs and benefits to either farmer landowners or developers.Task 2.2 - Extracting costs and benefits to local governments. We will expand upon the Database of State Incentives for Renewable Energy (www.dsiresusa.org) and build a solar policy database by municipality, specifying differences in municipal and state tax, subsidy, and zoning rules as they apply to solar development. For instance, in Minnesota, production and property tax rules for small scale under are quite different from those for medium and large scale solar. We will use this data to allocate fees, taxes and subsidies to respective government entities.Task 2.3 - Extracting society costs and benefits. We will attribute the external portion of net societal costs and benefits from ecosystem services and other environmental goods to the influencing entities. We will first distinguish external costs and benefits accruing directly to the landowners and developers, with the remainder attributed to government entities.Task 2.4 - Aggregate across four levels by spatial extent. Once we have attributed costs and benefits to the four entity types for each parcel and item in our cost and benefit vector, we will aggregate by entity type and various spatial extents (municipalities, counties, states and totals), providing both local and regional summaries of costs and benefits across scenarios.